Chief executive Pekka Järveläinen said the Finnish-Israeli company chose to build the data centre because of its security and fibre-optic connections.
"First of all, Finland is the most stable country in the world and a safe place to invest. Tampere provides good fibre optic connections to St. Petersburg and Moscow. It’s even better now that Sonera will in due course invest in fibre optic connections to St. Petersburg and Moscow. This is the safest route to the east,” he pointed out.
The high-tech data handling facility will be located deep underground at a former aircraft manufacturing site that was constructed in Tampere in 1932. Following the second World War the factory was used to build much of the heavy machinery that Finland delivered to the then-Soviet Union as part of an armistice in which Finland agreed to pay war reparations.
Between 1944 and 1952 Finland delivered 340,000 railroad cars of products including electrical motors, mills, locomotives, vessels such as icebreakers and schooners and wood houses. The burden of reparation however helped shape the backbone of the Finnish industrial sector.
The site has remained untouched and will require extensive work to make it suitable for hosting high-tech equipment. Järveläinen said that the first of several server halls will be complete at the beginning of August.
Sabotage always a risk
Airber Networks didn’t initially intend to publicise the location of the data centre, but public information about the cave system was already available, but is still erring on the side of caution.
“There is always a risk of sabotage. These are high-security installations. We will not provide any street addresses,” Järveläinen added.
He noted however that Aiber Networks isn’t such a high-profile player that it would be necessary to conceal the centre’s final location.
Major companies such as internet giant Microsoft keep information about their installations close to their chests. It will not disclose any specific information about the location of its data centre in southern Finland.
“A professional could use routing information to figure out the site of the Microsoft facility,” Järvinen remarked.
He pointed out that even if the location of Aiber Networks' data facility were to be worked out, it probably wouldn’t matter, since data centres now have access to highly developed encryption technology. There would also be physical barriers, he added.
“No car would get anywhere near, and no people would be allowed in. Like a bomb shelter, we will create many layers of security.”
Investment could reach 100 million euros
The Aiber Networks investment will serve demanding customers in Israel and Russia. Järviläinen said the initial outlay in the project will be some two million euros.
So far the company’s customers have only reserved a small portion of the cave system. The CEO said that the ultimate goal is to put the entire space to use.
“In order to use the entire space we would have to invest from 50 to 100 million euros. There are very strong growth prospects in this sector,” he observed.
The fully automated data centre won’t provide work for many, but operations will require extra hands for application management tasks. If and when the company expands abroad, the head count could reach 100.
